forinti

Look at the map in the article. It's a lot lighter in the middle than around the coastline. Niger, Chad, Burundi, South Sudan, CAR. These are all very poor. Malawi is not really an exception.

The Central African Republic, which has a low population density, lots of water and arable land is also very poor. As is South Sudan. It must be very hard to trade your way out of poverty if you are landlocked in a poor continent. All the countries in Europe are well off by world standards because there's an enormous market next-door.

People will pay for OpenAI to have access to their financial data??

They have a slow connection. That's a constraint that will keep you efficient.

The UK built a crayfish processing facility so that they could have income. They also sell stamps and a few handmade crafts such as knitted socks. There are a few government jobs and they must make some money from tourism. And they all grow potatoes for their own consumption.

Time is a precious resource and you learn to filter who you spend it with.

Aren't 5 pound coins worth more than the face value?

About 20 years ago there was a gang that made fake Brazilian R$1 coins (they must have been worth 50 US cents then, I don't recall precisely). And I have collected a couple of very shady R$0,50 coins that I'm pretty sure are fake. I collect commemorative coins so I always check my change carefully.

I don't think the materials are expensive, but the electricity required might be. So my guess is that this might make sense if someone steals the power. One guy was busted stealing electricity to mine bitcoin a few years ago.

OTOH, maybe they just do it for fun.

You could get any Raspberry Pi (even a Zero) and run RISC-OS on it.

I just love those documentaries where he starts off in Europe following some bird and ends up on a rock in the middle of the ocean. And he's been at it since when the world was much bigger. What a life!

Absolutely. Look at the Portuguese Empire: even at the end most Portuguese were poor and many had to emigrate.

Most British had a low standard of living going into the XX century. Engels' report to Parliament painted a bleak picture of the standard of living in Britain at the peak of the British Empire.

The US has a long tradition of arm-twisting to forward its business interests.

This habit is starting to do more harm than good (to them) and they should try to focus on innovating the way China does.

If only it would fit on a floppy.

Don't get me started on Access...

I had a little crisis at 12 when I went from BASIC to Pascal: how was that supposed to work without line numbers? The statements were just floating around without structure!

The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.

Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.

More code means more support and more maintenance. If your team is already overloaded or if it's going to be reduced because of AI, things are going to get tough.

I went through a decade-long battle to get the veterans to use ANSI syntax with Oracle and we only really managed to change the culture because most of them retired.

I've heard mechanics can send their kids to college servicing Land Rovers.

I really enjoyed Better Call Saul and thought it was much much better than Breaking Bad. Walter White was such an irritating character. Saul was a brilliant hustler.

I'm guessing that at 40 thousand quid you can have some disposable income, but that at 1200 bucks you spend it all on basics.

They are way too expensive. Tanzania's per capita GDP is about US$1200.00.

There's no doubt that it's a dictatorship, but Belarusian citizens are not slaves.

Furthermore, when have sanctions achieved anything other than suffering for the people?

Plus, I'm pretty sure that some sanctions are very convenient for some parties on this side of the game.

Belarus makes tractors. I bet people could have had these kinds of tractors long ago if not for the sanctions.

Will this market be significant? This would surely affect a very small percentage of visitors.

How does it compare to a Markov chain generator I wonder.

If I can install alternative firmware, I will definitely consider buying one.

Unfortunately, the pain that Windows has become has yet to prevail over the fear of change for many users.

I bought one of these. In those days, I could keep the JDK in a box of floppies or it could fit in one Zip. Unfortunately, you had to carry your drive with you, because few people had one. So it only really made sense as backup media for me.

I already had the impression that auto-complete was bad for programmers, since I've many times seen coders brute-force it until they found something that looked like it would do.

With AI I've also witnessed people go crazy going back and forth without even looking carefully at the code (or the compile messages) to figure out what was missing.

I'm pretty sure nobody will read the docs now.